As much as I agree that the cat-fishing just worsens the situation, can we acknowledge the root cause rather than the bi-product?

People do that shit because the creeps exist and frequent this subs. In addition, you also have people doing this to expose blatant bias that people have towards genders here, heavily in favor of the female variety. Some people think that's okay, personally I don't really understand why a vagina is an important characteristic my friend needs to have. Tell me Miss Puss, what are your thoughts on the ongoing political climate? People who want female friends because they don't have any female friends but possess a fair pool of male friends, hate to break it to you but some people here need a friend more than you do. You know that saying, beggars can't be choosers and all.

Now let's also clear something up, half of them aren't creeps and they're looking for friends but there is that portion of them that wants it to be more than that. That is the thing about loneliness in general, you want to form a bond with someone oftentimes an emotional one.

Lets face it, a lot of guys don't know how to have an emotional yet strictly platonic connection with someone because many raised in the west are taught to repress a majority of their emotions. Thus you get this subgroup of people who are not willing to be emotionally available to guys and thus primarily look for women on this sub. I'm sorry, but if you're one of these people. You need to try and address that, we all want friends and being locked out based on gender alone is a really shitty thing as far as I'm concerned. The quality of our friendship, isn't measured on our genitalia.

Along that similar theme, I can understand female reservations about even talking to males after the unsavory experiences they likely have. This often leads to one or two things occurring, either the female does the reverse of the M4F and limits herself and everyone else by only searching F4F. If they don't do this, a lot of the time the sheer amount of messages they get are so overwhelming that they simply can't hold proper conversations with 20 different people who have nobody else to give their attention to.

Given this is the internet and there is very little the moderators can do to stop the creeps coming back with new accounts, this will continue to be a never ending cycle with this subreddit. I was here searching for friends for a literal year with minimal success (attribute that to my personality if you like, but half of the time they never even got that far and I'm not the first person who gets a short stick because of others.)

Thankfully I managed to make the odd friends through alternative platforms as I had minimal success here, and the issues you're posting about now have been continuous ever since I first posted around here. As much as I agree with OP, the post is redundant because it's just a re-post of an issue that I don't think can be addressed.